The Birth of New Brunswick

When Governor Parr wrote to Sir Guy Carleton,
commending in such warm terms the advantages of Shelburne, he took
occasion at the same time to disparage the country about the river
St John. 'I greatly fear,' he wrote, 'the soil and fertility of that
part of this province is overrated by people who have explored it
partially. I wish it may turn out otherwise, but have my fears that
there is scarce good land enough for them already sent there.'

How Governor Parr came to make so egregious a mistake with regard to
the comparative merits of the Shelburne districts and those of the
St John river it is difficult to understand. Edward Winslow frankly
accused him of jealousy of the St John settlements. Possibly he was
only too well aware of the inadequacy of the preparations made to
receive the Loyalists at the mouth of the St John, and wished to
divert the stream of immigration elsewhere. At any rate his opinion
was in direct conflict with the unanimous testimony of the agents
sent to report on the land. Botsford, Cummings, and Hauser had
reported: 'The St John is a fine river, equal in magnitude to the
Connecticut or Hudson. At the mouth of the river is a fine harbor,
accessible at all seasons of the year--never frozen or obstructed by
ice... There are many settlers along the river upon the interval
land, who get their living easily. The interval lies on the river,
and is a most fertile soil, annually matured by the overflowing of
the river, and produces crops of all kinds with little labor, and
vegetables in the greatest perfection, parsnips of great length
etc.' Later Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Allen and Edward Winslow, the
muster-master-general of the provincial forces, were sent up as
agents for the Loyalist regiments in New York, and they explored the
river for one hundred and twenty miles above its mouth. 'We have
returned,' wrote Winslow after his trip, 'delighted beyond
expression.'

Governor Parr's fears, therefore, had little effect on the
popularity of the St John river district. In all, no less than ten
thousand people settled on the north side of the Bay of Fundy in
1783. These came, in the main, in three divisions. With the spring
fleet arrived about three thousand people; with the summer fleet not
quite two thousand; and with the autumn fleet well over three
thousand. Of those who came in the spring and summer most were
civilian refugees; but of those who arrived in the autumn nearly all
were disbanded soldiers. Altogether thirteen distinct corps settled
on the St John river. There were the King's American Dragoons, De
Lancey's First and Second Battalions, the New Jersey Volunteers, the
King's American Regiment, the Maryland Loyalists, the 42nd Regiment,
the Prince of Wales American Regiment, the New York Volunteers, the
Royal Guides and Pioneers, the Queen's Rangers, the Pennsylvania
Loyalists, and Arnold's American Legion. All these regiments were
reduced, of course, to a fraction of their original strength, owing
to the fact that numbers of their men had been discharged in New
York, and that many of the officers had gone to England. But
nevertheless, with their women and children, their numbers were not
far from four thousand.

The arrangements which the government of Nova Scotia had made for
the reception of this vast army of people were sadly inadequate. In
the first place there was an unpardonable delay in the surveying and
allotment of lands. This may be partly explained by the insufficient
number of surveyors at the disposal of the governor, and by the
tedious and difficult process of escheating lands already granted;
but it is impossible not to convict the governor and his staff of
want of foresight and expedition in making arrangements and carrying
them into effect. When Joseph Aplin arrived at Parrtown, as the
settlement at the mouth of the river was for a short time called, he
found 1,500 frame houses and 400 log huts erected, but no one had
yet received a title to the land on which his house was built. The
case of the detachment of the King's American Dragoons who had
settled near the mouth of the river was particularly hard. They had
arrived in advance of the other troops, and had settled on the west
side of the harbor of St John, in what Edward Winslow described as
'one of the pleasantest spots I ever beheld.' They had already made
considerable improvements on their lands, when word came that the
government had determined to reserve the lands about the mouth of
the river for the refugees, and to allot blocks of land farther up
the river to the various regiments of provincial troops. When news
of this decision reached the officers of the provincial regiments,
there was great indignation. 'This is so notorious a forfeiture of
the faith of government,' wrote Colonel De Lancey to Edward Winslow,
'that it appears to me almost incredible, and yet I fear it is not
to be doubted. Could we have known this a little earlier it would
have saved you the trouble of exploring the country for the benefit
of a people you are not connected with. In short it is a subject too
disagreeable to say more upon.' Winslow, who was hot-headed, talked
openly about the provincials defending the lands on which they had
'squatted.' But protests were in vain; and the King's American
Dragoons were compelled to abandon their settlement, and to remove
up the river to the district of Prince William. When the main body
of the Loyalist regiments arrived in the autumn they found that the
blocks of land assigned to them had not yet been surveyed. Of their
distress and perplexity there is a picture in one of Edward
Winslow's letters.

I saw [he says] all those Provincial Regiments, which we have so
frequently mustered, landing in this inhospitable climate, in the
month of October, without shelter, and without knowing where to find
a place to reside. The chagrin of the officers was not to me so
truly affecting as the poignant distress of the men. Those
respectable sergeants of Robinson's, Ludlow's, Cruger's, Fanning's,
etc.--once hospitable yeomen of the country--were addressing me in
language which almost murdered me as I heard it. 'Sir, we have
served all the war, your honor is witness how faithfully. We were
promised land; we expected you had obtained it for us. We like the
country--only let us have a spot of our own, and give us such kind
of regulations as will hinder bad men from injuring us.'

Many of these men had ultimately to go up the river more than fifty
miles past what is now Fredericton.

A second difficulty was that food and building materials supplied by
government proved inadequate. At first the settlers were given
lumber and bricks and tools to build their houses, but the later
arrivals, who had as a rule to go farthest up the river, were
compelled to find their building materials in the forest. Even the
King's American Dragoons, evicted from their lands on the harbor of
St John, were ordered to build their huts 'without any public
expense.' Many were compelled to spend the winter in tents banked up
with snow; others sheltered themselves in huts of bark. The
privations and sufferings which many of the refugees suffered were
piteous. Some, especially among the women and children, died from
cold and exposure and insufficient food. In the third place there
was great inequality in the area of the lands allotted. When the
first refugees arrived, it was not expected that so many more would
follow; and consequently the earlier grants were much larger in size
than the later. In Parrtown a town lot at length shrank in size to
one-sixteenth of what it had originally been. There was doubtless
also some favoritism and respect of persons in the granting of
lands. At any rate the inequality of the grants caused a great many
grievances among a certain class of refugees. Chief Justice Finucane
of Nova Scotia was sent by Governor Parr to attempt to smooth
matters out; but his conduct seemed to accentuate the ill-feeling
and alienate from the Nova Scotia authorities the good-will of some
of the better class of Loyalists.

It was not surprising, under these circumstances, that Governor Parr
and the officers of his government should have become very unpopular
on the north side of the Bay of Fundy. Governor Parr was himself
much distressed over the ill-feeling against him among the
Loyalists; and it should be explained that his failure to satisfy
them did not arise from unwillingness to do anything in his power to
make them comfortable. The trouble was that his executive ability
had not been sufficient to cope with the serious problems
confronting him. Out of the feeling against Governor Parr arose an
agitation to have the country north of the Bay of Fundy removed from
his jurisdiction altogether, and erected into a separate government.
This idea of the division of the province had been suggested by
Edward Winslow as early as July 1783: 'Think what multitudes have
and will come here, and then judge whether it must not from the
nature of things immediately become a separate government.' There
were good reasons why such a change should be made. The distance of
Parrtown from Halifax made it very difficult and tedious to transact
business with the government.' and the Halifax authorities, being
old inhabitants, were not in complete sympathy with the new
settlers. The erection of a new province, moreover, would provide
offices for many of the Loyalists who were pressing their claims for
place on the government at home. The settlers, therefore, brought
their influence to bear on the Imperial authorities, through their
friends in London; and in the summer of 1784 they succeeded in
effecting the division they desired, in spite of the opposition of
Governor Parr and the official class at Halifax. Governor Parr,
indeed, had a narrow escape from being recalled.

The new province, which it was intended at first to call New
Ireland, but which was eventually called New Brunswick, was to
include all that part of Nova Scotia north of a line running across
the isthmus from the mouth of the Missiquash river to its source,
and thence across to the nearest part of Baie Verte. This boundary
was another triumph for the Loyalists, as it placed in New Brunswick
Fort Cumberland and the greater part of Cumberland county. The
government of the province was offered first to General Fox, who had
been in command at Halifax in 1783, and then to General Musgrave;
but was declined by both. It was eventually accepted by Colonel
Thomas Carleton, a brother of Sir Guy Carleton, by whom it was held
for over thirty years. The chief offices of government fell to
Loyalists who were in London. The secretary of the province was the
Rev. Jonathan Odell, a witty New Jersey divine, who had been
secretary to Sir Guy Carleton in New York. It is interesting to note
that Odell's son, the Hon. W. F. Odell, was secretary of the
province after him, and that between them they held the office for
two-thirds of a century. The chief justice was a former judge of the
Supreme Court of New York; the other judges were retired officers of
regiments who had fought in the war. The attorney-general was
Jonathan Bliss, of Massachusetts; and the solicitor-general was Ward
Chipman, the friend and correspondent of Edward Winslow. Winslow
himself, whose charming letters throw such a flood of light on the
settlement of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, was a member of the
council. New Brunswick was indeed _par excellence_ the Loyalist
province.

The new governor arrived at Parrtown on November 21, 1784, and was
immediately presented with an enthusiastic address of welcome by the
inhabitants. They described themselves as 'a number of oppressed and
insulted Loyalists,' and added that they had formerly been freemen,
and again hoped to be so under his government. Next spring the
governor granted to Parrtown incorporation as a city under the name
of St John. The name Parrtown had been given, it appears, at the
request of Governor Parr himself, who explained apologetically that
the suggestion had arisen out of 'female vanity'; and in view of
Governor Parr's unpopularity, the change of name was very welcome.
At the same time, however, Colonel Carleton greatly offended the
people of St John by removing the capital of the province up the
river to St Anne's, to which he gave the name Fredericktown
(Fredericton) in honor of the Duke of York.

On October 15, 1785, writs were issued for the election of members
to serve in a general assembly. The province was divided into eight
counties, among which were apportioned twenty-six members. The right
to vote was given by Governor Carleton to all males of twenty-one
years of age who had been three months in the province, the object
of this very democratic franchise being to include in the voting
list settlers who were clearing their lands, but had not yet
received their grants. The elections were held in November, and
lasted for fifteen days. They passed off without incident, except in
the city of St John. There a struggle took place which throws a
great deal of light on the bitterness of social feeling among the
Loyalists. The inhabitants split into two parties, known as the
Upper Cove and the Lower Cove. The Upper Cove represented the
aristocratic element, and the Lower Cove the democratic. For some
time class feeling had been growing; it had been aroused by the
attempt of fifty-five gentlemen of New York to obtain for
themselves, on account of their social standing and services during
the war, grants of land in Nova Scotia of five thousand acres each;
and it had been fanned into flame by the inequality in the size of
the lots granted in St John itself. Unfortunately, among the six
Upper Cove candidates in St John there were two officers of the
government, Jonathan Bliss and Ward Chipman; and thus the struggle
took on the appearance of one between government and opposition
candidates. The election was bitterly contested, under the old
method of open voting; and as it proceeded it became clear that the
Lower Cove was polling a majority of the votes. The defeat of the
government officers, it was felt, would be such a calamity that at
the scrutiny Sheriff Oliver struck off over eighty votes, and
returned the Upper Cove candidates. The election was protested, but
the House of Assembly refused, on a technicality, to upset the
election. A strangely ill-worded and ungrammatical petition to have
the assembly dissolved was presented to the governor by the Lower
Cove people, but Governor Carleton refused to interfere, and the
Upper Cove candidates kept their seats. The incident created a great
deal of indignation in St John, and Ward Chipman and Jonathan Bliss
were not able for many years to obtain a majority in that riding.

It is evident from these early records that, while there were
members of the oldest and most famous families in British America
among the Loyalists of the Thirteen Colonies, the majority of those
who came to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and especially to Upper
Canada, were people of very humble origin. Of the settlers in Nova
Scotia, Governor Parr expressed his regret 'that there is not a
sufficient proportion of men of education and abilities among the
present adventurers.' The election in St John was a sufficient
evidence of the strength of the democratic element there; and their
petition to Governor Carleton is a sufficient evidence of their
illiteracy. Some of the settlers assumed pretensions to which they
were not entitled. An amusing case is that of William Newton. This
man had been the groom of the Honorable George Hanger, a major in
the British Legion during the war. Having come to Nova Scotia, he
began to pay court to a wealthy widow, and introduced himself to her
by affirming 'that he was particularly connected with the hono'ble
Major Hanger, and that his circumstances were rather affluent,
having served in a money-making department, and that he had left a
considerable property behind him.' The widow applied to Edward
Winslow, who assured her that Mr Newton had indeed been
connected--very closely--with the Honorable Major Hanger, and that
he had left a large property behind him. 'The nuptials were
immediately celebrated with great pomp, and Mr Newton is at
present,' wrote Winslow, 'a gentleman of consideration in Nova
Scotia.'

During 1785 and subsequent years, the work of settlement went on
rapidly in New Brunswick. There was hardship and privation at first,
and up to 1792 some indigent settlers received rations from the
government. But astonishing progress was made. 'The new settlements
of the Loyalists,' wrote Colonel Thomas Dundas, who visited New
Brunswick in the winter of 1786-87, 'are in a thriving way.'
Apparently, however, he did not think highly of the industry of the
disbanded soldiers, for he avowed that 'rum and idle habits
contracted during the war are much against them.' But he paid a
compliment to the half-pay officers. 'The half-pay provincial
officers,' he wrote, 'are valuable settlers, as they are enabled to
live well and improve their lands.'

It took some time for the province to settle down. Many who found
their lands disappointing moved to other parts of the province; and
after 1790 numbers went to Upper Canada. But gradually the settlers
adjusted themselves to their environment, and New Brunswick entered
on that era of prosperity which has been hers ever since.

This site includes some historical materials that
may imply negative stereotypes reflecting the culture or language of
a particular period or place. These items are presented as part of
the historical record and should not be interpreted to mean that the
WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes implied.

Chronicles of Canada, The
United Empire Loyalists, A Chronicle of the Great Migration, 1915